


200 years isn't forever

by alpacasandravens



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: (from elias), Angst, It's Peter, M/M, Major character death - Freeform, background fluff (from jonmartin), multi-power!martin, the unhealthy relationships tag should be implied for lonely eyes, writing martin killing peter is self care
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-23
Updated: 2019-09-23
Packaged: 2020-10-27 01:00:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,957
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20751707
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alpacasandravens/pseuds/alpacasandravens
Summary: Elias doesn't realize what he has until it's gone. Or, Martin kills Peter, and it takes Elias over a year afterward to realize he'd loved his husband all along.(mostly written after 152, so some things don't align with recent episodes.)





	200 years isn't forever

Something is wrong.

It isn’t as obvious as an alarm going off or even a sudden chill in the air, but something is off. Elias sits up from where he’d been lying on his prison cot, eyes closed but Looking intently.

It doesn’t take him long to find the problem. The Institute, his Institute, is closed to him. He can See the building, but every time he tries to get closer, to take a look at whatever is happening inside, he can’t. All he can see is static.

After all these years, he’s used to a bit of static. Most other powers don’t like him spying without permission, so the static has become a constant reminder of when he is seeking things powerful entities do not want him to Know. But this is his Institute. His power, his Beholding. 

Even when he’d given the Institute to Peter for safekeeping, Peter had never blocked him out of his own base. He couldn’t - his power, while considerable, was nowhere near that strong. The most Peter had ever done was hide, or send an unsuspecting employee to the Lonely for a day or two, or (on a few occasions) hide Jon when Peter wanted Elias to pay less attention to his Archivist and more attention to him.

What was going on in the Institute now was something all too familiar. This was as strong as the Unknowing.

Elias had felt the Lonely before. He’d fed it so well these last two hundred years, with all the longing for Peter, even when he was with him. Peter had told him it was exquisite, once. Elias had immediately divorced him. But he’d never felt anything like this.

So Elias tried and tried to Know what was happening in his Institute, sitting on his cot with his head in his hands and his mind pressing against the static that would not drop. He Saw nothing.

In the office of the Head of the Magnus Institute, temperatures had dropped to sub-zero. The air conditioners, adjusted to the mild climate outside, blew in room-temperature air that felt almost tropical compared to the chill.

The office had never been heavily furnished, but everything except the desk and chair had vanished into a thick sea of fog. Peter was trapped to the chair, struggling against nonexistent bonds. When had Martin gotten so powerful?

On the other side of the desk stood Martin, and if Peter hadn’t spent the last year gleefully trampling on Martin’s dignity and sense of morality, he would have said Martin was terrifying. He wasn’t hunched over anymore, not trying to make himself smaller. Martin stood tall, and from behind his glasses his eyes glowed with a strange light. The fog curled around his feet protectively, the way it had only ever done with Peter. And as he watched, a spider crawled out of Martin’s sleeve.

Peter felt his bonds loosen, then vanish entirely, and he stood before he was once again frozen in place. The fog obscured the desk and chair too, until Martin and Peter were the only things left in this unending, foggy gray expanse.

“You’re staying here,” Martin told Peter in the same tone he himself used to use on Martin. Like he was bearing an unfortunate truth and enjoying it.

Peter tried to speak only to find the words ripped from his throat.

“I know,” Martin said. “I know the Extinction is a threat. But so are you. And I can handle this myself.”

Martin turned and walked away, vanishing into the unending background, and Peter watched him go. He’d never been afraid of the Lonely, he reflected. He’d always known he was Forsaken, but over so many years he’d forgotten to worship it. It was hard to remember the peace of pure solitude, the utter abandonment of the world, when he had a husband to go home to. It was one of the reasons he’d left Elias so many times.

This wasn’t peaceful. The fog that enveloped him wasn’t his but, somehow, Martin’s, and it froze Peter and choked him and filled him with the absolute certainty that his death was profitable enough for his god that it wouldn’t save him.

It felt like hours before the static lifted on the Institute. Elias’s head hurt from trying to See so badly that he could barely focus, and as he looked at his hands they seemed to blur in front of him. Squeezing his eyes shut, he Saw the static lift and watched as Martin walked out. Alone.

This in itself wasn’t surprising. Ever since he’d given Martin to Peter (as a sort of consolation prize for taking over the Institute), Martin had grown into the Lonely. He’d known he would. So what was surprising wasn’t the fact that Martin was alone, but how much power rolled off of him as he closed the door to Peter’s office and slowly, deliberately left the Institute. 

He really was never going to stop underestimating Martin, was he. He didn’t mind his imprisonment so much, but whatever it was Martin had just attempted had come out of nowhere. It was just so hard to concentrate any effort into Watching that oaf of a man, constantly blundering about making tea, his thoughts an irritating string of concern, emotional trauma Elias had seen in too many people to be interesting, and that strange infatuation with his Archivist.

Maybe he should have kept a better eye on him, after Martin had put him here. He would certainly have to look into whatever had just happened. He couldn’t have Peter doing something as silly as creating a new avatar in his space, or, even worse yet, trying to attempt a ritual. The institute was for the Eye alone.

Elias isn’t suspicious when he can’t See Peter at the Institute the next day. Peter likes to hide from him, sometimes. He knows it makes Elias restless when he can’t See him, and much as he avoids confrontation, he loves making Elias just angry enough to be entertaining. Besides, Elias isn’t even sure Peter goes in to work every day. It’s not like he cares about the Institute, and he will admit, the place gets old pretty fast.

He doesn’t See him the next day either, but this is still no cause for concern. Once Peter hid himself for six months, though that had been after a rather major fight. When Peter had last visited him, the week before, he’d left with a mischievous smile and a kiss that had promised he’d be back soon. Still, Elias isn’t bothered. He has better things to be thinking about, like how to make his Archivist care more about feeding the Ceaseless Watcher than about protecting Martin Blackwood. 

Elias is starting to get irritated with Peter after about a week. He’s had to listen to his Archivist’s near-constant thoughts about Martin (which ranged wildly from a painful worry to an ecstatic burst of joy at seeing him from across the office to a rather depressing tangent on how Martin’s fingers had brushed his as he handed him a statement and how very much he’d like to hold Martin’s hand), and it is more than he can handle. Peter liked to mock him for not tamping down on ‘his soap opera of an Archive’, and Elias wishes his Archive was more like an actual soap opera. At least then there would be intrigue.

The fog of the Forsaken is starting to rise off of the Institute, and Elias is concerned. Nothing new is settling in its place, but that fog should not lift. Elias is still in prison, and he wonders if his Institute has any management at all, or if his waste of a husband has given up entirely.

Elias is ready to break out of prison three months later, when the first thing he sees after fixing his gaze on the Institute one afternoon is Martin gently pushing his Archivist against a wall in the Archive, statement abandoned on the floor. He is irrationally angry at his Archivist for letting a distraction come between him and Beholding, though he knows he is guilty of much more frequent and much lengthier distractions himself. Normally, he would watch, but their thoughts are so full of love and adoration (and strangely lacking in lust) that he briefly regrets having telepathy in the first place.

But this leaves him certain Peter has abandoned the Institute. After everything, Elias thinks, fuming. Peter is going to pay for this. Elias briefly considers another divorce before accepting, not without a healthy helping of anger at himself, that he’s really too desperate to see Peter to divorce him now. He might yell at him, even though he knows Peter will just fade away from the conflict. Yelling would be cathartic.

It’s been seven months since Elias has seen Peter when he starts looking for him. He searches the decks of Peter’s ship (laid up at dry dock, hasn’t been touched in a year) with an urgency he tries to ignore. The crew members have all moved on, and if they miss their outrageously high-paying job, they don’t think on it much.

Elias is more worried and less angry than he’d like to be when he sorts through the mind of Melanie King just short of eight months after the incident. All he finds is a deep disgust for the Institute, a fantasy (much more repressed than the last time he’d Seen her) of slowly filleting him with a knife, and irritation with his Archivist. The only Peter-related thought he runs into is a short sentiment of how glad she is the “damn bastard” is gone. 

Daisy is much the same. Unhelpful, too busy worrying about falling back to the Hunt to think about anything Elias cares about. These employees and their morals. He briefly wonders why he’d hired her before remembering he hadn’t.

For some reason, Elias can’t get inside Martin’s head, and that scares him. Not that he would use the word ‘scared.’ It unsettles him, that once again his most useless employee has managed to surprise him. Martin Blackwood, he thinks, is quickly becoming his most interesting employee.

Elias shouldn’t be able to get inside his Archivist’s head. His defenses should be stronger than that. He’s grown weak in the time since Elias left. Must not be eating enough.

But his disappointment with his Archivist is nothing compared to his anger with what he Sees in his mind. Behind the mess of Martin Blackwood and a hunger that would be so easy to sate and abominable amounts of self-loathing, Elias finds pride. It’s mixed in with everything else he feels for Martin, and it would be so easy to overlook it, but Elias is getting desperate. He follows faint thought of Peter to its source, and what he finds is a tangle of admiration and pride and a little bit of fear, all for Martin. 

Because Martin had killed Peter.

Elias shuts the eye he’d had on Jon so quickly he feels a headache start to form. He closes his physical eyes too, just for a moment, and shakes his head. There is no way Martin, complicated as he apparently is, could have killed Peter. Martin wasn’t even an avatar; Peter had served the Lonely for two hundred years. It simply wasn’t possible.

Still, Elias tells his guard to add Martin Blackwood to his list of allowed visitors. He sees when Martin receives the notice, and he sees when he immediately folds it in half and throws it in the trash can.

It isn’t until months later that Elias starts to consider that Martin really had killed Peter. He doesn’t know how that could have happened, not unless Peter had been slipping, but he’s out of other options. The Tundra is still sitting in dry dock, and he’s heard rumors from the dock hands of it going up for auction soon if it sits there unclaimed and with the storage fees unpaid for much longer. Peter’s had that ship for almost as long as Elias has known him.

Nathaniel declines Elias’s phone calls six times before finally picking up. 

“He’s alone, then. I’m glad; I’d almost thought he’d forgotten how to serve the Forsaken,” Nathaniel says. 

“So you don’t know where he is either.”

Nathaniel sighs. “I don’t care to know.” He hangs up.

And it’s then that Elias really, truly knows. Because he can’t See Peter anywhere, and he can’t feel the absence that surrounds him when he’s in the Lonely. And if he isn’t anywhere, then -

Martin must have really done it.

At first, it’s fine. Elias had already worked through all the anger anyway, back when he’d still been looking for Peter. He doesn’t miss him any more than normal, and that had become background noise sometime in the 1830s. 

“My husband’s dead,” he says cheerfully to his guard one morning, to test out how it sounds.

“You don’t get out for his funeral,” the guard says, not turning to look at him. 

“That’s fine.”

And it really is fine. He wouldn’t have anything to say, anyway. Not that there was going to be a funeral. The Lukases either didn’t know or care that Peter had died, and he wasn’t going to be the one to tell them. But even if there was a funeral, Elias wouldn’t go. Funerals are for two things: honoring the deceased, and bringing their loved ones closure. Elias doesn’t think Peter deserves any honor, and he doesn’t need a ceremony for closure.

That doesn’t stop him from waking up in the middle of the night, certain that if he reached out, Peter would be there. His fingers brush the cold cement wall of his cell, and he closes his eyes again, glad there is no one to watch him acting like such an idiot.

It happens more than once, and he hates it. Peter always ran cold, but the chill in Elias’s cell could never be mistaken for a human body. Not while he’s awake, anyway. But when he sleeps, sometimes he dreams that Peter is next to him. Even while asleep he knows it’s unrealistic - Peter is rarely around long enough for something as simple and (he hates to think it) reassuring as sleeping next to each other. When he wakes, he misses the dream, and he curses himself for it.

It must be the complete lack of visitors. That’s the only reason Elias would be sitting in his cell in the middle of the day idly reminiscing. He sits and he thinks of the time in the late ‘80s when he’d finally gotten Peter to smoke with him. Peter had never been cuddly, something to do with the Lonely, but Elias had finally gotten him stoned and they sat in metal chairs with too many cushions on a balcony (he thinks it had been in Italy, but he’s not sure), and Peter had pulled his chair next to Elias’s and leaned his head on Elias’s arm and laughed at a bird that hit a street sign. Elias catches himself thinking he wants to do that again sometime when he realizes that there won’t be a next time. Peter is dead.

“My husband’s dead,” Elias says again. It’s been fifteen months since Martin killed him, since the last time Elias saw him, and for the first time there’s something brittle behind his voice.

“So you’ve said,” the guard says, indifference edging on annoyance.

“You never really know what you have until it’s gone, do you?”

Things are never supposed to end. He and Peter were supposed to be eternal, caught in the same cycle of unhappy marriage and divorce with just enough moments of joy to keep them coming back to each other. That’s how it had been for two hundred years, and that’s how it would always be. Except it’s over, now. 

It’s all Martin’s fault. 

Martin and his Archivist got all the happiness they wanted (and if he thought about it a little, Elias could See them sitting on the cot in the Archives, his Archivist drifting off as they watched a cooking show on a tiny laptop screen). Elias had never expected life to be fair - it couldn’t be, not with the fear entities and such out to gleefully ruin people’s lives. But that didn’t stop a sharp spike of jealousy forming in his chest. Martin got everything he wanted, and Elias had gotten nothing. 

“I always thought I knew what it was to miss someone,” Elias continues. He’s never been one to believe in an afterlife, but he’s speaking more to Peter than to the guard, though he knows Peter can’t hear him. “But it’s different missing someone you know will eventually come back.”

“You know what they say,” the guard said, tone indicating he would rather be anywhere else. “Better to have loved and lost, or whatever.” 

“So they say.”

Elias thinks, for the first time in a long time, that he really was in love with Peter. That he probably still is. He thinks about the last time he saw Peter, pulling him down for one last kiss before he left. He doesn’t remember what the last thing he’d said to him was.

He doesn’t wish he’d told Peter he loved him. He just wishes that hadn’t been the end. They’d always worked towards their rituals, knowing that if either of them were successful, what they had would be gone. Elias had always assumed that would be the only way they’d end. But Martin Blackwood had messed everything up. Elias doesn’t have a ritual, he is losing his Archivist, and (he might hate this most of all) his husband is dead.

**Author's Note:**

> if you enjoyed, leave a comment/kudos below or come yell about this podcast w me @alpacasandravens on tumblr!!


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